By:Doug Miller
In a dramatic improvement from 2003, 58.8 percent of the class of 2008 met or exceeded state standards on the test. Just 49.8 percent passed last year.
The fourth-graders did far better: 86 percent met the state standards, third-best among the 17 districts in Southwest Nassau County. Only Rockville Centre (93.6 percent) and Lynbrook (88.1) did better.
But it was the eighth-graders that school officials boasted about. "Last year those numbers were too low," said Superintendent of Schools Ronald Friedman. "We set a goal for a significant improvement, and met it."
The tests have been revamped in recent years to place more emphasis on reading comprehension and less on vocabulary, so as to better gauge a student's ability to learn and a teacher's ability to teach, rather than just measuring study skills, Friedman said. "With the newer standards, we needed to teach kids - for lack of a better phrase - to think better," he said. "We're teaching them to more effectively analyze what the kids read, rather than just testing them on what they can remember and regurgitate."
To bring about this change, the district hired an outside consultant, David Dearing, with BOCES funds, to work with the teachers. The teachers administered practice tests under conditions designed to replicate test day, in order to figure out which students were going to need special attention. "We did everything the same, but on test day we included breakfast so they would be nourished," said Ellen Sedlik, an eighth-grade language arts teacher.
"Every district tries different things [to improve test scores], and some work and some don't," Sedlik added. "The kids saw how hard we were focusing, they knew how important this was, and they worked so hard."
"We're testing both the students and the teachers," Friedman said. "Giving students the ability to decode the language is a high-level teaching skill."
The reward for the improved scores is bragging rights, an indication to the community that the administration is meeting its educational mandate, Friedman said. "These numbers clearly demonstrated that we were able to deal with the challenge of test scores [in 2003] that were lower than we wished," he said.
